Lake of Fire

by Linda Jacobs

  “These settlers are squatting on our land,” Toohoolhoolzote said. “My father and his father before him sleep beneath the land that is our Mother.”

  General Howard placed a flat hand on top of a Bible that lay near him on the table. His voice rang out, “I am not going to listen to any more Dreamer nonsense or talk of Earth Mothers.”

  Bitter Waters got to his feet, his head brushing the sloping canvas. Looking down upon General Howard, he pointed in turn. “We have kept the peace for many years, while the settlers have killed thirty of our People.” He spoke in Nez Perce, too angry for English. “Only last week my mother was killed like an animal.” He spat on the grass before Howard’s highly polished boots.

  Howard turned to Toohoolhoolzote for translation.

  Bitter Waters listened to see if Toohoolhoolzote would translate faithfully or decide with the wisdom of his seventy snows to temper the message. He braced himself to step in and correct the older man in defiance of etiquette.

  Toohoolhoolzote repeated it precisely.

  The rest of the chiefs rose with a clicking of bone breastplates. The Nez Perce, inside and outside the tent, even the women with babies in arms, also got up. Bitter Waters caught Kamiah’s eye, as she struggled to reach him through the colorfully dressed crowd.

  The five officers with Howard closed ranks about the general.

  “Take these men to the guardhouse,” Howard called.

  Other soldiers surrounded Bitter Waters and Toohoolhoolzote.

  A murmur ran through the crowd like a rising wind. Bitter Waters looked at the pile of stacked arms where the Nez Perce had laid down their weapons.

  Toohoolhoolzote faced his captors; his lined face might have been carved from stone. “You may lock me up,” his voice dripped disdain, “but behind me are always more of the People.”

  “You tell your people,” Howard ordered, his face flushing, “that you will go onto the reservation within thirty days, or the soldiers will shoot you down!”

  Around the Wylie campfire, the crowd erupted with a variety of reactions conveying everything from indignation at the tribe’s fate to approval of the Nez Perce being hunted. Through it all, Cord heard Laura’s gasp from perhaps fifteen feet away.

  He turned and saw she stood transfixed, one hand at her throat. Unaccountably, anger swelled his chest.

  What did she know of suffering? Of watching one’s parents die, of being taken virtual prisoner by his own uncle … of going through the difficult rite of seeking a guardian spirit, then finding a way of escaping it all?

  Yet, as Laura’s tear-filled eyes met his, he felt a tightness in his chest and wanted to go to her.

  Before he could, Bitter Waters continued, “Toohoolhoolzote and I were held prisoner for eight days while the council went on. Then we were released.”

  Weeks passed, and the men and women of the non-treaty groups pretended the summer sun would continue to shine without incident. Berries ripened, and the young men took advantage of long twilights to spend time with the equally ripening girls coming to womanhood.

  Then the chiefs decided their people should move to summer camping grounds to enjoy the balmy June weather. Some reacted with joy, for the annual pilgrimage lifted everyone’s spirits. But when Bitter Waters and his wife, Kamiah, left his fine farm near the Wallowa River, he felt they were abandoning it for the last time.

  On the river crossing at Dug Bar, deep in the desolate heat of Hell’s Canyon, with the Snake running high, even the bravest wondered if they would cross safely. They were right to worry, for hundreds of struggling cattle and horses were swept away downstream into a narrow-walled canyon.

  Once encamped in the highlands, far from the reservation lands the United States had decreed as their destination, Bitter Waters went to the council lodge and confronted the elders. “There are only a few suns remaining in Howard’s ultimatum.”

  Joseph responded to his challenge with a long speech. He reminded everyone that their camping grounds were pleasant, and that there was still time for the chiefs to parlay their way to consensus. Bitter Waters had learned to expect Joseph to seek the peaceful solution, but since Seeyakoon’s death, he could no longer see the wisdom of turning the other cheek.

  “My mother is not yet cold,” he declared. “I say that if it is war they want, let us give it to them.”

  The elders, as had happened so many times before, remained divided.

  Bitter Waters marched away from the council lodge, trembling with rage.

  Outside, it was pleasant beside a lake in the sun, young men racing their horses on the meadow, and women spreading camas with wilting blue flowers to dry in the sun. He wished that this were like any other year, when the wind would soothe his brow and he would find his wife, Kamiah, take her from her work, and walk with her in the forest.

  It had been her sweet strength and the new life that grew within her that had persuaded him not to go after Harding the night he murdered Seeyakoon. “The settlers will lynch you if you kill a white man. You must wait for justice.”

  Looking around for her, he saw his friend Tarpas Illipt approach, leading a spotted gray. Still in high spirits from racing, Tarpas headed his mount toward the lake for a drink.

  “Mind your horse!” A man called Walks Alone waved his arms at Tarpas, but it was too late. The horse had trampled his drying rack, collapsing it upon the shore.

  “I have worked hard with my wife, gathering so much camas.” Walks Alone gestured angrily.

  Bitter Waters had never liked thick-waisted Walks Alone, not since he had set his dogs on him and Tarpas when they were youths stealing apples with Sarah. Smiling at Tarpas, Bitter Waters spoke slyly to Walks Alone, “My wife, Kamiah, is pregnant, but still you do not see me do woman’s work.”

  Walks Alone threw aside the broken pieces of his drying rack. An ugly look took over his features. “Bitter Waters, if you’re so brave, why have you not avenged your mother’s death?”

  Without hesitation, as though this new insult on top of General Howard’s ultimatum had torn the shackles of civilization from him, he leaped astride Tarpas’s horse, wheeled the animal, and drew his friend up behind him.

  At the communal paddock, they picked up another horse. And though he wanted to see Kamiah before they rode out, she would only try to stop them.

  By the time they reached their goal, night was overtaking them.

  Rifles at the ready, Bitter Waters and Tarpas reined in their horses before the settler’s cabin beside the Wallowa. Around the log building, a fence enclosed a plowed square with melons, corn, and potatoes beginning to come up. Beyond was the cleared land awaiting the apple trees Harding had spoken of, enclosed by the rail fence that had cost Seeyakoon her life. Half a dozen hounds lay on the packed earth of the yard, settling in for the night.

  “Harding!” Tarpas shouted.

  Bitter Waters was glad his friend had called out, for his own throat felt thick.

  In the bluish shadows of the porch, the rough wooden door swung wide to reveal Harding with his thick head of graying hair. He carried a pistol, poorly camouflaged at his side.

  Tarpas and Bitter Waters slid to the ground.

  With a barely perceptible motion, Harding gestured to his dogs. In spite of their apparent somnolence, in a single surge, the pack leaped to attention. They charged, baying.

  Bitter Waters stood his ground while Tarpas aimed and fired, picking off two of the dogs. Bitter Waters shouldered his own weapon and took out two more. The remaining animals hesitated and stood in confusion, sniffing at the bodies of their fallen comrades.

  Harding raised his weapon, but before he could get off a round, Bitter Waters shot him through the heart.

  “It is war,” he declared.

  Laura pressed her fist to her mouth, for she knew what came next from accounts of the struggle … displacement, battlefields, and death. It was easy to miss the human side when reading the dry prose with which history was often related.

  But whether t
he government of the United States dealt with the Navajo, Apache, or the Nez Perce, the record was all the same. Ever since white men had first set foot on the soil of North America, they had broken every treaty made with those who dwelled there before they arrived.

  Heedless of anyone seeing, she went to Cord. “I didn’t know.”

  Bitter Waters bowed his head and turned away before his listeners realized he was leaving. He walked to the tipi, threw back the flap, and disappeared inside.

  The skin fell back into place.

  Cord shook Laura off and strode forward. She gathered her wits and moved, circling behind the tent to head off Bitter Waters if he sneaked out the back.

  It didn’t take long. No sooner had she left the circle of firelight and entered the forest than she saw a man emerge from the tipi’s rear.

  “Hold, sir,” she said.

  Bitter Waters looked surprised, but stopped with a swing of his braids. “My story is complete. For this night.”

  “There is a man who needs to speak with you. About other parts of your story.”

  Bitter Waters held her gaze and nodded. “Though the two of you stand apart, you are the woman of Blue Eyes.”

  Cord stepped around the side of the tipi, too late not to have heard the last words.

  Bitter Waters studied the two of them with what looked like compassion. “Sarah stood thusly with Franklin Sutton before she went away with him.”

  Beneath the older man’s scrutiny, Cord was proud to have Laura by his side. But the last thing he wanted was for her to stay and be caught up in his old hurts.

  He bent his head and spoke to her quietly, “Let my uncle and me speak together privately.”

  Her eyes flashed reluctance.

  “Please,” he said, “go now.”

  Without a word, she turned her back.

  Only after her rapid footsteps retreated toward the hotel could Cord let the mention of his parents churn up the pain. “Sarah stood with my father before you drove her from her People. Before you came in the night and murdered her and her husband.”

  Bitter Waters shook his head. “I am sure a six-year-old boy might not remember the details, but your father’s gun misfired. Your mother died in a terrible accident. And it was not I who threw the blade at Franklin’s chest.”

  Cord believed he spoke truth, for that was the way the nightmare ran each time it came upon him in the darkest part of the night.

  “Do you recall what happened next?” Bitter Waters asked.

  The house had burned, but somehow that did not seem to be the answer.

  His uncle went on, “I took you up onto my saddle and wrapped you in the betrothal hide Tarpas made for Sarah—which she still kept. Your mother lived between two worlds, as Seeyakoon did when she loved a white man and bore a half-breed daughter.”

  “As I do,” Cord ground out. “When I escaped from the tribe in Yellowstone,” he noted his uncle’s flinch, “a white man adopted me …”

  The lines beside Bitter Waters’s mouth deepened. “I had taken you in as blood of my blood. You are of the Nimiipuu, the People.”

  When Cord had heard those words from him as a six-year-old, he’d denied the tribe. This evening, after facing his uncle for the first time in so many years, it was no longer so simple. He bore the scar of the Mormon boy’s knife, the brand of “savage.” But he carried his wayakin of obsidian with him always, as though some part of him did believe.

  “I can no longer deny my ties to two worlds, old uncle,” he said. “The trouble is that, like my mother, I belong in neither of them.”

  “Until you accept them both, that shall remain true.”

  Bitter Waters seemed to evaporate into darkness.

  All was still beside the lake, while Cord walked the shore. The hotel lights shined like a beacon.

  Two worlds.

  When he had conceived the concept for Excalibur, to renovate a decaying warehouse and create a first-class hotel not far from where the Mormon Temple had been under construction for years, his adopted father, Aaron, had invited him into his library. They had sat among the shelves of well-worn books, everything from Cord’s childhood favorites of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, to the family Bible.

  Being in that room always reminded Cord of what had happened years ago, after the older boys attacked him in the schoolyard.

  He’d been lying on the ground, bleeding. Carey loomed over him with an ugly smile, tossing his knife from one hand to another. Then Aaron, blond like Carey, with the most unusual whiskey-colored eyes—no way he would ever be mistaken for Cord’s blood father—arrived.

  Aaron wasn’t as big as Carey, but he came up behind and grabbed him and Levi and knocked their heads together. Then he looked down at Cord and put out his hand to help him to his feet. “Come home, son.”

  With the knife wound on his cheek throbbing with each heartbeat, with insults still ringing in his ears, Cord had gone with Aaron into the library. He’d watched the older man open the book of scripture, bound in Moroccan leather, and pull his fountain pen from its stand on his desk blotter.

  In neat script, he inscribed the name “William Cordon Sutton” in the Bryce family Bible.

  In their Mormon extended family, Aaron’s wife, Carolyn, tried to teach Cord to play the parlor organ. Uncle James held forth to instruct Cord in Latin and proper penmanship, and when Cord’s adopted sister, Evie, gave birth to a boy, she named him William Cordon. Aaron even seemed connected to the Jackson Hole ranch. It had been his influence, and that of the bishop of the Mormon Church, that had permitted Cord’s claim to the land to pass unchallenged.

  But the conflicts at Excalibur between him and Thomas had made him ripe for Edgar Young’s approach, eager to go to St. Paul and Yellowstone. No, desperate to find a niche where he might control his destiny.

  Desperate enough to try to pass for a man without Nez Perce blood.

  Beside the lake, he sighed and felt the knots beneath his shoulder blades. How must Sarah have felt, leaving behind her village, her mother, her brother, to go with Franklin? And how did Cord feel this night, meeting his uncle again after over twenty years?

  Dismayed that his past had caught up with him? Or, after hearing Bitter Waters tale, ashamed he had denied his mother’s People?

  Laura hurried back to the hotel, wondering why Cord had not wanted her to stay. Perhaps his uncle’s assertion that she was his woman had scared him off.

  The more sinister explanation had to do with Constance. Cord had come to the table and asked her to go out with him. Laura had thought, no, hoped his intent had been to break off with her, but she didn’t know. In fact, though honor wouldn’t permit a gentleman to call a lady’s claim to betrothal a lie, there was darker potential.

  He might not want to end being the recipient of Constance’s favors.

  Halfway to the hotel, she remembered Danny Falls lurking about and moved faster.

  Upon entering the festive lobby where music played, she saw Constance dancing with Norman Hagen. At least Laura wouldn’t have to deal with accusations about following Cord out of the dining room … until later.

  Her father was in the game room, intent on the cards in his hand. Aunt Fanny was part of a group that included Lieutenant John Stafford.

  Laura hurried toward the stairs. She didn’t care to run into anyone like Hank or Larry Nevers and socialize. She especially did not want to see Manfred Resnick and deal with more questions.

  Once the door of her room closed behind her, she did not turn the light switch. She didn’t even look toward her bedside candle, but went to the window and opened it wide.

  Somehow, being indoors heightened her awareness of the forest she had walked through. On the dark trail, she’d been closed to sensation, hurrying toward safety and light. Now, she inhaled the perfume of pine and appreciated the call of a wild duck. The bird sounded as if it was laughing.

  She deserved to be laughed at. She had no idea who Cord r
eally was, or what he stood for.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JUNE 27

  Good-looking animals,” Cord said, his breath making smoke in the chill morning sunlight. He looked over the team of four chestnut horses that would carry them to the canyon.

  “Thank you, sir.” The stocky young driver wore the uniform of knee-length tan duster, brimmed hat, and dust kerchief. He raised the canvas cover on the wagon’s rear platform to check on the lunches. “Cord Sutton.”

  “Burke Evans.” He offered a hand hard with calluses. “I chose this team because they pull together well and it’ll be comfortable for the ladies.”

  Cord rubbed his hands together and stamped his brown leather boots against the early-morning chill. His head felt cold where his hair was damp from his hasty toilet. “Ah, yes. The ladies.”

  “And does that make you a gentleman?”

  Cord whirled to find Laura, slight and wiry in her boy’s trousers and a white shirtwaist-style blouse beneath her brown wool coat. Seeing her in pants took him back to the time he’d spent alone with her in the forests south of Yellowstone Lake. Though he had not had a chance to clear things up with Constance, he smiled.

  Laura’s lips did not bow in return.

  There were too many folks around, drivers waiting alongside their wagons and guests speculating with interest about the day’s sightseeing.

  “Come with me.” Cord indicated with a jerk of his head for her to walk with him.

  “I don’t think we have anything to say.”

  “Please.” If he couldn’t manage to set things straight with Constance, he’d at least let Laura know it was in the works.

  “No.” But at the driver’s curious look, she seemed to change her mind. Squaring her narrow shoulders, she went with him down the length of yellow board wall and around the corner of the hotel.

  There, he shoved his hands into the pockets of his sheepskin coat. “What’s the matter with you this morning?”

  “Nothing. I am merely going to see the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone at Hank’s invitation.” She lifted her chin.